Why Children Have a Right to Mom and Dad (A Conversation with Katy Faust)

we have a controversial but very important topic to discuss today which is favoring the rights of children over the desires of adults i have with me today katie foste who's written a fascinating book called them before us which i recently katie you know i have this series that on instagram called game changers books that change the way i think about a topic when i read your book it was game changing for me and very eye-opening so we're gonna jump in and look at this but first off katie thanks for coming on the show thank you i'm really glad to hear that um it's not the first time you know once you start to talk about children's rights um and start to understand the importance of a child's mother and father that they don't just need them that they don't just benefit from them but they have a right to them you don't unsee it you know you start to look at every headline every conversation differently so i'm glad that was the impact that it had on you thanks for uh letting me share it with your audience well it was and i hope it has the same effect on my audience so let's jump right in and start with your story and your experience growing up in your family clearly shaped your world view and gave you a passion to speak into this subject would you share that with us yeah um my parents were married until i was ten i was really connected really loved them both um and then they divorced and it rocked my world my dad dated and remarried um before he passed away five years ago my mom soon after their divorce partnered with another woman and they've been together ever since so i had split time between my dad's house and my mom's house um thankfully my mom and dad had a really amicable divorce i was stayed in contact with both of them i got to benefit from the love of my dad and the love of my mom um i love her partner i don't consider her partner my mom but i do consider her partner my friend um so i wasn't raised in a christian home i became a christian late in high school i was still an idiot for most of that time uh and then i really grew in my faith as a college student um when i went off to college and met my husband and we kind of figured out what this whole christian worldview thing was together and then we did a lot of youth ministry my husband became a pastor i had kids and i was really happy just living my life keeping my friends not talking about controversial things and then the gay marriage debate started out and what i heard the other side saying was kids don't care if they're raised by two moms or two dads which what that means is they don't care if they've lost their mom or dad and i said you're lying i've never met a kid who lost their mom or dad through death divorce abandonment and now reproductive technologies who didn't care most of the time they would say that it left a lifelong wound so that's when i felt like i started i needed to speak up because um it now was an issue of injustice against children now you first spoke up in a blog that was called ask the bigot i didn't know it was you it was anonymous i read it sometimes reposted stuff and i understood why you're anonymous because of the kind of frankly criticism i get daily from people that's pretty harsh at times but then when it came out i'm like oh this is katie i understood take us back a little bit to what you were doing with that blog and then how you came out so to speak in what you're doing now yeah um so i used to blog and honestly because i'm a coward because i understood the cost i understood i was going to lose friends and i hated that i i love to be loved i hate to be hated and the hatred coming from the culture and even from some people close to me not my family thank god um kept me quiet they did their job accusing people of being haters and bigots and homophobes um was very effective for me because some of the people i love the most in life are gay and lesbian and um i hope i'm some of the top people on the top five list of people that love them as well so um yeah i started blogging anonymously because i thought i need to make the case for marriage as a social justice issue for children because marriage is not just a private arrangement between two adults it's the only relationship that unites the two people to whom children have a natural right and that's why it deserves to be respected and protected in different ways than other adult relationships but then in the name of love and tolerance i was outed by a gay blogger who then doxed members of my church in an attempt to silence me um yeah and wrote terrible things about my husband and our church and all of that and it's such a what the enemy means for evil kind of story because i didn't have my anonymity anymore and so then i would get invitations to you know speak at the united nations or travel to australia to meet with their members of parliament or submit amicus briefs to the supreme court so that's what i did you know his attempt to silence me actually just enlarged my platform a hundredfold um that eventually turned into this realization that it can't just be katie being like listen i actually know a lot of other kids with gay parents who who don't like it so trust me um and i went somebody's got to document these stories there has to be a safe place for people to talk about the impact of mother and father loss in their life people have to be able to read it and interact with it themselves because it's stories that stir the heart um and that's the one thing that pro-family people just haven't had is the real life stories of kids now you used a term that's probably going to trigger word for some people when you said social justice and applied it to marriage now typically we'll think of safe poverty we'll think of race uh maybe people with disabilities why do you apply that to issues of family marriage and reproductive rights why is it a social justice issue yeah so sometimes if i'm giving like a talk at a a school or um a conference or something you know i'll put up a chart and i'll say here's some issues i want you to tell me which one of these you would solve if you could um homelessness youth homelessness youth poverty teen suicide teen dropouts teen pregnancy um behavioral issues incarceration rates like high incarceration rates choose one which one really burdens you which one if you could solve would you just say that one's gone and i usually get a lot of different answers because a lot of us are really burdened about various different issues based on things that we've seen or the volunteer work we've done and then i say what if there was an all-of-the-above option what if there's one thing that you can do that wiped out decimated took down to a tenth every single thing that i just mentioned would you do it and what if it was cheap and they're like yes tell us that thing and i said well that thing is father's um that thing is making sure that the children has daily constant access to both their mother and father and what you see when you look at children who are living in poverty or on the street or home behavioral issues or substance abuse or high incarceration rates or teen pregnancy all of those different demographics are overpopulated with fatherless children that's the power of children's rights that's the power of children being loved and connected to the two people responsible for their existence and marriage is the only way they're going to get both and so i tell my dear dear friends on the left please continue manning the hotline for the suicide prevention line please continue anti-poverty work and volunteering with at-risk kids but if you do not also get on board the children's rights training you get no social justice there is no social justice first you have to secure individual justice for the child in the home then you can tackle those other issues so um that's why marriage is a social justice issue for children because if they don't get marriage they're drastically at risk for every other social ill that we are battling today well i want to come back to some of the data that you document in your book again them before us about the importance of mom and dad in the lives of kids um excellent it is it is a fantastic book i hope viewers will pick it up and and read it here's a quote from your your book don't explain you say quote adult desire almost exclusively drives the narrative when you're talking about family marriage reproductive rights and divorce what do you mean by that that statement yeah i mean whenever you read a headline or have a conversation or look at a piece of legislation that has to do with marriage family divorce reproductive technologies sperm and egg donation surrogacy even adoption look at the headlines look at who's telling the story look at what kind of words they're using it's all about i want i feel i struggle um i need and it's always focused almost obsessively on what adults want sometimes they'll mention the kids if they do it's well my kids will be happy if i'm happy my kids don't want me to stay in an unhappy marriage or my kids going to be okay that they are created through sperm or egg donation because they're so loved and wanted my kids are going to like this you know my kids are going to be okay my kids are going to get over it um that's what we hear that the adults say about the kids um and i would just tell your audience like try me try it just look at headlines about marriage and family look at what's coming through the news listen to the conversations that are happening in the culture and maybe in your own world how much of the time do those center around this is what the kids need these are their rights i'm gonna bend and sacrifice so that they don't have to do the hard thing i'll do the hard thing so they don't have to i dare you right find me those articles they're extremely rare but the reality is that when we get questions about marriage and family wrong when we allow adult desire to drive not just headlines but policy and personal decision the children are the victims every time and so that's what we try to do in the book is make it very clear that these are the victims and this is how they're being harmed for those of you joining us we're here with katie foste who's written a great book them before us which basically makes the argument that the entire narrative in our culture is about adult desires over children's rights and we've ignored children's rights to their detriment now let me start this next part by asking you to talk about the difference between a natural right and a legal right and the reason i'm asking to make that distinction is one of the things you said in the book that gave me pause and i have a master's in philosophy and i've studied this for a long time is you said kids have a right to their mom and dad now first let's let's actually start there what do you mean when you say kids have a right to their mom and dad yeah they have a claim on their mom and dad um that is distinct from their claim to any other adult to any other person really um in fact like adults we understand we have a pretty pretty fundamental understanding of the fact that adults have a right to the children that are born to them when you have a baby you don't want to just take any kid home from the hospital you want your baby right there's something special about your baby indeed you have a right to that baby there's something distinct about the relationship that you have with that baby that's pretty easy for us to understand guess what the child cares who they go home with the hospital with too that baby has a claim to those parents to those specific adults because those specific adults have something that the baby needs wants craves and has a right to now a lot of people on the right i think are very leery of rights talk indeed the term children's rights really needs to be redeemed because unfortunately it is being distorted misused and often for what i think is very um detrimental in detrimental ways right children's sexual right children's right to um you know sexually identified to sexual pleasure right that's often how people understand the term rights well when you look at natural law it's obvious that children have a natural right to both of their biological parents we talk a little bit about this in the book like how do you know that something's a natural right and we we say look conservatives look christians you actually already use the language and understanding of children's rights when we're talking about fighting abortion children have a right to life and that's something that we can stand unflinchingly on even though it's not necessarily a legal right in this country it's a natural right we can understand by looking at the nature of a child and embryology and natural law principles that children indeed do have a natural right to life guess what kids also have rights on this side of the womb and the primary right once they have their right to life protected is their right to the two people responsible for their existence i got to tell you when i first read that i took it to my wife i'm like think about this it's so obvious that a mom and dad have the responsibility and the right to take their kid and not another well that right goes both ways the kid has the right to be taken home by mom and dad and not another it seems so obvious when you frame it that way in your book you argue for something what makes a right a right what's the underlying kind of ideas here that makes say sexual rights the way you're framing it for kids is very different than the right to life yeah so you know we talk about we make the case that um well first of all the term rights in general has been so used and abused it's really hard to tell what's a right because some people will say like i have a right to government-funded birth control i have a right to housing i have a right to education um those are all good things oh well you know some of them are good things some of them like will say well people have a right to water well water is a good thing but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a right to it and so we give we're kind of lay people my co-author stacy and i we're not the deep philosophers so we're like okay here's the three rules that make it a rights test so number one is it needs to be pre-government a right is something that existed before the government existed the government is just there to protect it not provide it um second nobody has to provide you with the natural right um you just have it right the right to defend yourself the right to life you simply have it the government just needs to protect it and finally a natural right is distributed equally everybody naturally has the same amount so um you know and and the alternative is commodities like you can actually tell when something's a commodity is if it can come in different degrees like mar-a-lago versus a dormitory right because housing is different you automatically know that it's not a right so when you look at a child's right to life it completely passes the three rules that make it a rights test with flying colors right it existed pre-government no one has to provide it for you and everybody gets the same amount one life so that's how it is with children's right to their mother and father it's as pre-government as it comes whether you're on like team adventive or team homo erectus like this is a pre-government relationship number two nobody has to provide it for you if you exist your mother and father also exist and finally it's equally distributed everyone gets exactly two one mom and one dad so um when you're looking at it from a natural law perspective we also kind of throw in some quotes from melissa michelle who i think is the philosophical genius on parental and children's rights if you need a bigger name than me um but it's um if you look at it if you're able to look at it from the kids perspective and from the natural law perspective it's a pretty solid case so let me jump ahead with a question here and this is a topic that you cover in your book uh jason clover asks an important question that relates to this he said so does this apply to adopted kids they have a right to their biological parent or is that up to the adoption parents good that's a great question we have an entire chapter on adoption um because what we talk about through the book is that modern family is really just code for child loss the child has to lose something to be in that modern family but there is one form of parental breakdown and rebuilding that does protect children's rights and center around children's needs and that's adoption but we first have to have a proper understanding of what adoption is adoption is not a means for adults to get kids adoption is a critical institution that exists to meet the needs of children and so adoption is not about adults building their family right or i mean i love adoption i'm an adoptive mom but this is not about adults fulfilling their desire to have kids this is the child is the client and the child had to lose something critical to them before they became somebody in need of adoption to begin with they had to lose the two people to whom they had a natural right so first of all we have to never approach adoption casually adoptive parents these days like me were trained to understand that adoption is a process where you're going to be shepherding your child often through that lifelong loss that they're going to have different understandings about their adoptive story at different times that that loss is going to manifest itself in different ways and as an adoptive parent i would say i understand that i cannot fully compensate for everything that my son has lost um we are there to seek to mend the wound that was left when his biological parents um gave him up so um yeah adoption does have a role to play here but here's the difference what we do in chapter nine is we spend time contrasting adoption with reproductive technologies and so adoption is an institution that is centered around what the kid needs the adults do the hard thing by going through background checks um screenings vetting references post placement supervision the adults a lot of adults that want to be adoptive parents won't be not every adult who wants a kid should have one but when adoption is done well every child that needs a family is going to find one right because the child's the client we contrast that with reproductive technologies where the adult is the client where they don't go through any screening or vetting or background checks or supervision or post placement even though they very often go home with an unrelated child at least one adult is unrelated if not both of them you know in reproductive technologies they don't clear background checks their check has to clear right reproductive technologies are a marketplace not certain around the best interest of children but centered around the desires of adults so adoption is a critical institution that unfortunately exists because our world is broken um but adoption done properly um upholds children's rights whereas reproductive technologies willfully violates children's rights my sister was adopted my youngest sister and she's just been such a beautiful amazing addition to our family what's interesting is she got older she wanted to find her birth mother and part of it was understanding her story and who she is was tied to discovering and connecting with her mom and it's been a huge blessing in her life you talk about in the book how biology is tied to identity can you explain what you mean by that we have a chapter two this is a one of the foundational chapters in the book where we talk about why biology matters um first biology matters to the parent child relationship because statistically biological parents are the safest most connected to most protective of and most invested in their children um and when you look at you know that's not to say that a child's married biological mother and father means they will never experience abuse or neglect sure it's just to say that there's no other family structure that's even close in terms of abuse and neglect every time unfortunately when there is a home of a non-biologically related adult risks of abuse and neglect skyrockets so safety is one of the biggest aspects of why biology matters but the other thing that biological parents offer is biological identity and we know that because we've got lots of adopted kids and we've got a lot of donor conceived children who've been raised in loving heterosexual homes with moms and dads who scour the internet for hours and hours and years and years sometimes to find their absent mother or father that there's something for example for my son that i can't give him when it comes to his biological identity um sociologists child psychologists have been studying this um ever since the 60s when adoption kind of boomed during what they call the baby scoop era and they noticed that kids experienced something called genealogical bewilderment this feeling of like i don't belong like who am i like why do i look this way i'm not seeing myself mirrored back or reflected back in anybody else in the household and so all kids especially in adolescents are struggling to answer the question who am i and when you don't have those biological or kinship connections sometimes that question is harder to answer you know the man eric erickson the famous psychologist who coined the term um identity crisis was an adopted child well his stepfather adopted him and um he actually changed his name you know erickson was not his original name but he didn't know his dad he didn't connect with his stepdad so he renamed himself erickson as in i'm the son of myself i don't have any other deeper connection i mean identity um does have a big part of of who we came from and from whom we came and we know that because um those are the questions that adopt these and donor conceived children are asking those you just joining us we're here with katie foster and she has written a great book called them before us and we're talking about what it means to really value children's rights in a culture that puts adult desires first now you have something i think is pretty bold here you say quote to thrive outside the womb children require three nutrients in their socio-emotional diet their father's love their mother's love and stability tell me what you mean by those three things and why they're so important yeah well kids need a lot of things i've got four of them you know they need good friends they need a roof over their head you know they need they need all kinds of things but what we know from studying family structure for decades is that if they don't have one of these three socio-emotional staples in their diet mother's love father's love and stability they're going to be emotional emotionally malnourished and so we see that like we can see it in the numbers we can see it in the stories of kids we can see it in the outcomes of kids and that all three of those things are required just as sort of a baseline of social and emotional health and again back to why marriage is a social justice issue for children marriage is the only place the married home of a child's biological parent is the only place where they're going to be nourished on all three of those staples um for example in a divorced family they might get 50 of mom and 50 of dad but very likely they are living in a significantly unstable environment stability is often completely gone um in the wake of a divorce as dad dates and remarries um sometimes with step kids and then mom moves out and then um has a boyfriend has another child dad breaks up um they lose those step kids and he moves to another state mom has another baby but then she divorces again um you know divorce is often the very first of a long list of losses and transitions for kids instability is almost always the result of a divorce even if a kid is able to maintain a bit of contact with both mom and dad so um there really is no other unfortunately it's very hard for our 20-21 ears to hear um but that whole traditional marriage thing is the place where kids are going to receive the nourishment the social emotional nourishment foundational staples that they need to thrive there's so many lines in your book i was highlighting circling and and one of them that jumped out to me relates to something my father had said in his books he said me when i'm younger he said the greatest way for a dad to love his kids is to love his kid's mother and that kind of made sense to me the older i get the more i see it i'm like oh my goodness and you explained in your book you said kids feel loved when they see their biological mom and biological dad loving each other but this doesn't apply to step parents why is that so important and why do you think that's the case so i start out chapter two i think talking about this and this was an observation by pat fagan who is a marriage and family giant in terms of like marriage and family research but he had also done family counseling and he's a child psychologist for like 50 years and that's what he said he said it's fascinating because when kids watch their dad love their mom they feel like their dad is loving them and when they see their mom love their dad they feel like their mom is loving them he said it's like the only relationship that i know of where you can be loved indirectly where you're not directly being the target of the love but you feel loved anyway and i was like okay this is this is fascinating right so i've i spent since i heard that i'll ask different people who've shared their story or whatever if they had a step parent i'd say well what did you think when you saw your mom and dad or your mom and your stepdad kissing and the boys would be like i felt angry i was like get away from my mom or you know the girls would be like well i'll just wait and then you know i mean it's fine it's like i don't it's fine but it's not like i love it i'll just go in the other room um a lot of times the introduction of a step parent does not have that circuitous love effect but rather it will introduce competitiveness now the child feels like they're competing for love with their stepdad for the love and the affection of their mom so it's it's all together different um i think that i will i know that there are heroic step parents out there i've seen them um i know the kids who have been raised by heroic step parents who have stepped in to fill the gap of a missing or negligent biological parent and they're out there but when you're talking about the magic that just naturally springs up in a child when they watch their own mother and father loving each other so far i haven't heard of anything that can match it it's intuitively true and it's just and it's powerful and it's always stuck with me since my dad said that and sometimes i'll you know give my wife a kiss and the and the kids act kind of funny but there's something that just bubbles up in them that you know they want to see this affection from their mom their dad and it trickles down to them so mom and dad loving each other ben fits the kids you have a good amount in your book talking about how kids suffer in particular without the father such as girls getting puberty on average if correct me if i'm wrong about a year earlier which has some medical effects in the long run why is a father in the home so important how much time do you have um but you're right you know like you can see it in their bodies their bodies tell you that their father is important now we don't have as much experience with mother absence and mother loss because biology makes that a lot more difficult um you know mom is connected by a literal cord when the baby is born you have to cut that cord so it's a non-negotiable that mom is going to be there and then with breastfeeding and just the way that moms are wired in terms of nurturing and connection it's highly unlikely that mom's going to bail and abandon the kid but without the social and the legal cord of marriage it's not a guarantee that dad's going to be there and yet his presence is so critical um and you can see it in their bodies you can see it in their minds you can see it in their hearts you can see it in their behavior and so yeah the example that you gave is shocking that girls who do not grow up with their father on average um go through menses a year earlier and or have early menses we don't know exactly why it might be because you know an evolutionary biologist might say well that's because she realizes that there's a shortage of men so she has to get ready to reproduce sooner other people would say well there's a lot of pheromones from unrelated men in the home whether it's stepfather or mother's boyfriend and that triggers sort of the early onset of a girl's reproductive season but something in her body is saying it's time to go find a man sooner right which is um not awesome because uh coupled with a child's father hunger a girl's father hunger that she often experiences without dad that just means that's a recipe for higher higher teen pregnancy um so fathers do an awful lot for kids we spend a lot of time in chapter three talking about why dads and moms are different and why in fact we shouldn't even say parenting we should just say mothering and fathering that's how different men and women are in relation to their kids you talk about in your book that kids who are denied a mom and a dad because of different relationships naturally feel this hunger if they have two dads there's a hunger for a mom two moms there's hunger for dad and your point which i appreciate is to say that somebody's sexual orientation is irrelevant to whether they're a good mom or a dad has nothing to do with it but a man regardless of his sexual orientation can't be a mother and a woman regardless of sexual orientation can't be a father kids need both in the family relationship that's so important talk about that a little bit because you tell some stories about kids who grew up in for example same-sex parenting and will miss a mother because they say have two dads but never feel the freedom to share that and struggle internally and i believe correct me if i'm wrong you said sometimes it's not until middle age that they really process that hurt yeah there's a couple things there um so i'll just zoom out a bit and say when a child loses a parent to tragedy like a parent dies and you know we had to deal with this unfortunately a couple times as as youth ministers you're there when a parent dies but you know what happens is everybody comes around that child they mourn together the kid can remember um they're not alone in their grief their loss is validated um and there's a lot of people to talk to and bear that burden that's what happens when a child loses a parent to tragedy when a child loses a parent because of intentionality because adult desires are prioritized above the child's rights the child has to mourn in secret the child can't be open about their pain because they are living with the very adults who chose for their parent to be gone and so that places the sort of psychological burden on the kid where the kid actually has to start supporting the parents instead of the parents supporting the kids and so you actually see this in kids of divorce kids of reproductive technologies and kids with same-sex parents where they feel like i can't really say anything because if i do i'm really condemning the choices of the people that are in my home so that's really difficult and that's really true really of all desire based parental losses we see that in all of these different groups second yes many kids i have found it's pretty rare for kids to process this before they're 28. like you kind of have to be 10 years out of the home before you can really have the distance and objectivity to be like you know what that wasn't awesome i mean i felt really protective of my mom or i felt really protective of my dad and so i kind of was like oh my gosh having two homes is great but i'm like that sucked and it was actually really rough you know when my mom got remarried and then this new guy joined and i felt like he took over my home and i just i felt like i was a third wheel because now they were so focused on their new baby or whatever it was right that it just takes some time and distance before you're able to look back objectively so um those are true those are true statements i think for all of these different groups that we work with and whose stories we catalog um so if you want if that's not too long we can talk about kids with same-sex parents and the additional pressure that's placed on them think the challenge for them is that many of these kids are being told you're so lucky you're so lucky to have two moms you're so lucky to have two moms that love you the problem is many of these kids desperately want a dad why because they're human kids and all human kids want their dads and it doesn't matter if you have two moms who love you two moms or 10 moms will never be the dad that you have a right to and whose love you crave so that's really difficult especially i think for the kids with gay parents because they are going to be accused of bigotry and being anti-gay if they just say what every kid feels in their heart which is where is my dad who is he does he think about me does he wonder about me would he want to get to know me if he knew who i was where did he go i wonder if he would love me do i look like him um you know these are questions that kids definitely donor conceived kids ask a lot of kids with same-sex parents act but they these kids a lot of times they're in the closet because the people they love the most in their life are gay but saying that they want a dad the world says that's anti-gay so it's a pretty difficult position for some of them that dilemma the way you explain the book is really eye-opening to me because there's so many kids with two same-sex parents like i love my moms i love my dads that's not the issue but i feel a loss of something i'm betraying those who love me if i share this that's the bind that they're in um i want to ask you about the no difference thesis but first katie so you know there's a lot of comments excuse me of people saying katie's amazing gonna buy her book i know you get probably more criticism than i do so when the positive comments come take it take it to heart you i think you probably know this in 2014 john stonestreet and i wrote a book same-sex marriage the year before obergefell came out we saw the writing on the wall and i spent a good amount of time studying some of the research and articles that claimed there was no difference in the psychological emotional well-being of kids with same-sex parents and some said it's even better for kids you have a good amount of time in your book pushing back on that saying this does not really reflect where the studies are so tell us and obviously this only goes so far but as unbiased as you can what does the data really show about the effects of same-sex parenting as a whole on kids okay here's a really helpful thought experiment okay for your audience anytime researchers are not studying same-sex parenting they agree on three things number one biology matters in parenting that biological parents um benefit children in ways that non-biologically related parents don't okay nobody when you're not talking same-sex parenting that is the consensus number two that men and women offer distinct and complementary benefits to children that gender matters in parenting and that dads do something moms don't do and moms do something that dads don't do and kids need both number three kids are harmed when they lose when they go through the trauma of parental loss whether that's through death divorce abandonment or reproductive technologies whenever you're looking at kids whose parents have died kids whose parents have divorced kids whose parents created them through reproductive technologies right death divorce abandonment and even adoption if they are adopted subsequently after an abandonment any of those kids raised with heterosexual parents do not fare as well okay so that is the consensus when you're not studying same-sex parenting then something interesting happens when you study same-sex parented homes interestingly those kids fare no different or like you said even better despite the fact that you're always missing a biological parent you don't have the complementarity of male and female and you've always had the parental loss and the trauma that goes with that so tell me why why is it that suddenly the three items on which there is unanimous consensus among social scientists suddenly doesn't matter when you're studying same-sex parenting could it be because those studies use very small sample sizes they're not random participants they're recruited or volunteered they're not longitudinal they don't study children over long periods of time oftentimes they assess the adults how do you think your kid likes having two moms you think they love it awesome right they're not actually measuring the outcomes of the kids themselves as adults looking back saying yeah i actually did struggle with depression yeah i didn't i didn't do so well in school or i did kind of dabble with self-harm issues or yes we were on welfare or yeah i was seen by a psychologist yes i was diagnosed with a depression or anxiety right you're not actually measuring the outcomes of kids you're surveying how the parents think that they are doing and how they they think their children are doing so um that is why that is why those studies defy the consensus because they don't use good methodology so since you wrote that book there have been a couple pretty incredible large studies done primarily by um paul sullins where he draws data from um a couple large government [Music] data sources right cdc is one of them and then a national child abuse national child incident study report and both of those are graphed out in our book so that you can see that when you actually look at quality samples studied over time where kids actually reported the outcomes or you can actually see the outcomes not just what the parent thinks the outcome the no difference actually looks like a huge different difference and that kids really do suffer um when they're raised by two moms or two dads um paul sullins who i think has has probably interacted with more samples than any of the no difference people prior to 2015 at least would say it's not it's just like you said it's not because gays or lesbians are incapable of being good parents that's not it it's that they are incapable of both being biologically related parents and that's where the advantage seems to be when this topic comes up one thing i'll hear from students is well isn't it better for a kid to have two moms that be in the foster care system and when it's framed like that i found with younger people there's a sense of like yeah that actually is better for kids they find that compelling what's your response when you hear that so this is often posed in the hypothetical i think i'm the only person that's actually lived it um because i am a total children's rights advocate i've always believed in traditional marriage but i also used to work at the largest chinese adoption agency in the world um and this was before i was a mom but i was super adoption oriented i had been overseas several times i had walked the floors of orphanages i had seen the babies packed in cribs two and three at a time where the rooms were completely silent even though there was 150 of them because those babies had learned that nobody comes when they cry so they why bother i had walked the floors of orphanages where babies and kids had fingertips that looked like light bulbs that were blue on the on the tips of each one of them because they had holes in their heart and their body weren't wasn't pumping oxygen fast enough so so some good friends of mine who were lesbians said um we're gonna go get this kid this kid who has a significant special need and i knew because i was in the adoption world that that agency had tried to place that child with several heterosexual couples and nobody wanted to take her on but my lesbian friends said we will wow but we're going to need your help will you go with us because you have an adoption background you've kind of seen it um it's not going to be a shock to you and i said let me think hell yes i'm going and so we went and we spent two really really difficult weeks as that child learned to be with people that looked different smell different spoke differently um you know she was older she had a very significant special need it was hard it was really hard the baby ended up needing baby little girl ended up needing almost yearly surgeries she would have died she would have died without them and honestly there was no christian heterosexual couple who had the balls to do it so um you can acknowledge that there are times in places where a child would be better off with people like my friends with two loving men or two loving women but you can acknowledge that exception without saying so moms and dads don't matter so you we should throw away marriage as an institution um that unites the two people to whom children have a natural right you can and must acknowledge the exceptions and say adoption is all about finding the best parents available for a child um and then also say also there's an ideal and the ideal is that all children would have their own mother and father and if they've lost their own parents that whenever possible they are also raised by an adoptive mother and father because adopted kids need moms and dads too you know i i won't speculate about their family but i know other adoptive families where um whether it's a single or a same-sex parented couple yeah kids better off because they're not in an orphanage or because they're not in foster care but those kids still long for a dad too that that's awesome to recognize the sacrifice and love that they made without saying that exception overturns the rule and the norm and the good the kids need a mom and a dad i think that's a very fair response now i think your answer is probably going to be similar to this one uh but let me just jump in and bring one question over that i think is thoughtful uh darren says abusive mom and dad versus non-abusive same-sex both not an ideal in a christian worldview but would one be better for kids than the other hypothetically in situations really good so this is a question i'm leading a discussion group with some teens as well and they brought this up they also brought up so let's just knock these boces out at the same time of like okay well like what about the infertile couple right there's the infertile couple that can't have kids they're the same sex couple who can't have kids so why can't should they both be married should neither be married right and so what i what i think is so fascinating is in these kinds of conversations we immediately jump to the exceptions the exception is that biological parents are going to be abusive google google the words mother's boyfriend for me really fast like whoever's listening whoever asked the question tell me what you see you're gonna see pages and pages of the most horrific headlines about abuse and child death because cohabiting unrelated adults especially men are statistically the most dangerous person in a child's life statistically the safest adults that a child is going to have in their life is their own married mother and father are there abusive biological parents yes there are and i don't want to meet them in a dark alley with a club in my hand because that enrages me but do you understand how statistically unlikely it is that a non-biologically related couple is going to be more protective of a child than their own biological parent it is a statistical anomaly it's possible but completely unrealistic it is the exception versus the exception you are putting two exceptions against one another let's look at the norm right the norm is that biology matters significantly that's exactly why adoptive parents have to go through months of vetting screening background checks research reference home studies supervision post placement reports because social workers aren't fools they know that non-biologically related adults will not do not interact with kids the same way so i don't know which is better of those two i just know that they are both total extreme exceptions to um to the norm that that's super fair one of the things i try to do katie and i know i fall short of this is that i want to speak truth that jesus taught but i want to do it graciously with a kind heart who people with people who see the world differently and you do that in your book i think because of your experience because your mom just because of your life and who you are you have a bold statement that that i want to read you which i think is true and i want you to unpack this a little bit you said quote to suggest there's no difference between men and women is as destructive as it is false unpack that if you will that something so self-evident has to be explained is such a sign of the times right like men and women are gloriously different and unfortunately we've been sold this lie that we're not really equal unless we're the same which is really tragic because the only way that our species exists is because of our differences and those differences are the most beautifully and in my opinion critically manifested in the home i don't i mean you know god give me a president nikki haley you know i give me the justice amy coney barrett like i don't care if there's a female or may all female you know leadership at the bank i don't care right but men and women in terms of their differences and how that's manifest is so critical to have those gender differences and the gender balance in the home right and interestingly that is the institution that gets the gender balance exactly right every time right to have a child means that you automatically are going to have a perfect gender balance and yet the world is saying well you know men and women they're the same um they have to be the same if they're going to be equal um they've got you know all kinds of liberal laws saying we need equal representation for women on our boards or um you know there's a lot of countries that will say you have to elect a certain number of women to the legislature so at some point we recognize that gender balance does matter and yet we have spent so much time destroying the one institution that gets the gender balance exactly right and kids need moms and dads right i like we in the book we talk about all these different little examples but like google dads with baby videos and tell me what you see right you see dad's doing like the most goofy silly slightly risky really exciting things with their babies and the babies just loving it but look at moms look at moms with babies it's cuddle it's holding them close it's nurture it's soothing it's just like the perfect picture of naturally what moms and dads do differently with babies and babies need both they need that safe place to land they need the oxytocin that mom releases that lowers their stress and their cortisol levels that literally teaches them to have an emotional regulation and central nervous system kids don't develop that on their own mom nurture does it for them you also have dads that are throwing kids in the air like in toledo in tokyo in tianjin i mean dads throw their babies in the air on every continent of this planet and kids love it and they actually learn something really important about life from the rough and tumble play that dads offer and you can see it right the we refer to it as father hunger and mother hunger through the book when kids don't have it they long for it they crave it and on a very in a very real sense they're starved without it hmm i was driving my kids we want to hike his family this morning and i asked my kids just driving the car 8 and 13 i said if you google dad baby videos how do you think it'd be different from mom baby videos and like my kids got it they're like mom's probably cuddling and caring and my eight-year-old's like dad's probably throwing a football or a water balloon and and like both are equally valuable but the way you're organ is there's something universal built into a man and a woman now i venture people say well if you take same-sex parents they can get those things kids with same-sex parents from other relationships so it doesn't have to necessarily be in the home can't that mitigate some of the differences well you better right if you're two moms or two dads you darn well better find somebody who can be have a motherly role or a fatherly role in the life of a kid but um there's a lot of stories that we've got in our books so kids with two moms or two dads who are like nope i don't care i don't need some uncle that picks me up twice a month to take me out on a date or something i need my dad right there's this one there's this saddest story ever have this kid who wrote us it was actually a comment that he put under one of our posts and he goes so sad um i just want i just want a dad like my friends have there's you know my my uncle or it's it's his mom's friend and he goes he's kind of like me we're both kind of chubby we like to be outside we like hunting i think i'm kind of like him and i and i wish he was my dad why do why don't i get a dad and so even kids that have role models the role model is not the father um i've had kids say well what if one mom is like kind of feminine and the other mom's kind of butch so then one's doing the mom role and the other one's doing the dad roll i haven't met a kid or read the story of a kid of a same-sex couple who goes yeah that was totally it for me my butch mom absolutely filled that role of dad no this doesn't have to do with acting a certain way this has to do with manhood and womanhood and mothering and fathering isn't a switch that you flip on and off it's something that springs up in you because of your maleness or your femaleness and affects the way that you talk the way you discipline the way you play the way you interact the way you orient your child to the world the way that you present the world to your child these aren't things that you can just say i'm gonna i'm gonna dress a certain way right or i'm gonna use certain words or i'm gonna throw a football and that's going to do it i haven't met a kid that has been like yeah that does it for me so but i would encourage you why don't you read one of the i don't know 30 stories of kids with same-sex parents in the book who um and just take their word for it not mine well what i do appreciate about the book is there's a lot of stories you've captured but there's also a lot of facts that back it up so it's narrative and fact driven so it's interesting it's personal and there's some heartbreaking stories that just moved me to tears reading it but you're backing it up with the data now i know some people say to you they'll say katie your husband's a pastor you used to be a youth pastor why are you making these religious arguments from the bible what would your response be yeah i'm like yeah i know so much scripture on my website isn't there oh actually there's none so um we actually have a section in the book uh um where it says this isn't about religion in fact it shouldn't be about religion if you're a christian great but god made adam and eve not adam and steve just isn't going to cut it you have to become experts when it comes to the social science you have to be you have to be able to deal in the universal authority which is natural law and appeal to that common authority um you know we've got a section in the book where we kind of give a little test and say um what are the five major religions have in common you know judaism christianity islam buddhism hinduism let me give you a quick multiple choice test on what do those five religions agree the nature of god the nature of man the problem in the world the solution to the problem the nature of the afterlife or the definition of marriage what do they all agree on and the answer is marriage they all have something that looks a lot like men should commit to the women they're making babies with for life before they make those babies and that's because marriage children men women sex right those are universal truths that are recognized they're self-evident right and that's why they've made their way into all of these religious traditions we need to and we can make these cases not based on religion and so we don't you know there's no scripture in this book there's no scripture on my website even though um i'm bible crazy people like someday let's just do a bible chat um i can't get enough but this isn't the place honestly especially in public policy debates so let me ask you somewhat of a a question to personalize this i imagine there might be some people watching with two moms or two dads or somebody watching this who would want to share this with somebody in that situation i've met kids with two moms or two dads that are like the way you described hurts difficult form i've met two kids who at least said i'm fine i love it no issues with me all kids with same-sex parents included what message if you are speaking to them right now what would you say to kids who grow up in that family situation um that's good um first i would say it's okay to feel really protective of your parents um that's okay that's natural and especially when you're living in your home sometimes it's really hard to figure out like where's the line between where i am what i want how do i feel and feeling like i need to love and protect my parents so you don't need to say anything if you don't want um you know loving them that's totally okay but i would also say that if you feel like you're missing out or you you wish that you had a dad or you wish you had a mom i want to tell you you're not the crazy one okay you're not crazy for wanting that um you deserve that you were made for that and if the world is telling you that they're that you shouldn't want that or you're bad for wanting that the world is crazy for saying that you're not the crazy one um that you know i submitted an amicus brief to the supreme court for the bergafell case and we put in dozens of stories of kids with same-sex parents and what we say in that is um kids with same-sex parents aren't special it's just one of the many ways that kids experience mother and father loss and so you know any kid that's watching this who maybe has experienced parental loss from abandonment or a divorce or because they were created through sperm or egg donation or because they have two parents two moms or two dads you're not special you're just a kid and it's really natural to wonder about your missing parent and to wish that you were loved by that missing parent that's just what it means to be a human kid so um if that's how you're feeling you're not crazy you're just a human kid and that's what most human kids want katie thanks for bringing both your mind and your heart to this question i want to honor your time because when we jumped on your scrambling to make dinner i have somebody putting in faucets we're both parents run around trying to do this thing um so let me end by saying this i hope people will pick up your book them before us again each week on instagram i put a game changing book that just shifted my thinking in some fashion on a range of topics that i hope uh people who kind of follow me will pick up your book then before us is one of them tell us where else people can follow you ah i'm not awesome on social media um i kind of need a little social media discipleship link link um but i'm on twitter at advo underscore katie get it like advocate but it's advocating clever oh smart clever okay thanks thanks um and i'm on facebook i've got a public facebook page katie fowles which is probably a little more where i post because i just i can't i can't talk that short twitter's too short for me um we've got some instagram are them before us instagram page is great so if you're on instagram look for them before us i think of them underscore before underscore us we're there go to our website then before us.com you can sign up for our newsletters so that's something that the big tech giant so far can't control so um like you can log on there um the book is probably the best place to really get the full message and have all your questions answered we were really insistent that we do a detailed table of contents so you can sit down and you can read it all the way through or you can go oh my gosh what was that thing about abortion and surrogacy how is abortion involved in surrogacy i have to look at that oh somebody just said that if i'm against gay marriage that means i'm also the equivalent of someone being against interracial marriage wait a second what was that thing um oh where was that she said that bio biology means you're the most connected to and invested in wait i need to see some studies on that and so like it's really detailed i don't know if you're going to be able to see this but there's a ton right here's our table of contents and like it's a reference guide it's supposed to be your quick place to get answers about all of these questions and find the stories of kids because that's really where the power is when you're having a conversation about somebody who's like oh i just don't want to wait for mr wright anymore i'm already 40. my biological clock is ticking i think i'm just going to go get a sperm donor you grab the book you look at it you're like okay here's five stories of kids created through sperm donation um who were raised by single mothers by choice my friend needs to read this so we've got it broken up so you can get right to the information that you need on every single matter of marriage and parenthood it's all there for you the stories the studies the very best research katie you're awesome i hope everyone will pick up your book and follow you hang on don't don't disappear but those of you following this make sure you hit subscribe because we have some other interviews coming up you're not going to want to miss next week colby martin who i just saw in the comments i apologize i missed your questions he's a pastor wrote the book called the shift and describes himself as a progressive christian i'm an evangelical christian this is not going to be a debate we want to have a conversation find out what we have in common and also where we differ so this is a conversation for clarity so progressive evangelical invited into this conversation colby really looking forward to connecting with you we have behind the scenes interviews coming up with craig keener one of the leading new testament scholars in the world wayne grudem one of the leading theologians uh and a whole bunch of others so make sure you hit subscribe these are coming up and again this channel is brought to you by biola apologetics if you've ever thought about getting a master's we just started this katie we have a full distance program and apologetics we're the number one rated school so if you have an undergrad degree and thought about getting a masters in apologetics we would love to partner with you and help train you so there's information below but uh okay to hang on don't disappear the rest of you thanks for great questions and katie again there are a whole lot of positive comments where people are appreciative and some questions of people that didn't hear the beginning i invite you please go back and hear the beginning this is an hour-long conversation with a lot more context that might bring into play some of things she says and develops even further in the books again if a bunch of you enjoy this i heard quite a few of you say share this share this please do so give us a thumbs up it just helps with the metrics to spread the word for the channel what we're doing at biola and consider sharing it with a friend all right thanks so much everybody look forward to our next stream have a have a great night

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 15,813

Rating: 4.884131 out of 5

Keywords: faith, kids, responsibility, rights, marriage, children, LGBTQ

Id: Jq-_2dh6JLk

Length: 62min 53sec (3773 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021